Price: The supplements are expensive – very expensive. At the top end, if you follow Prüvit’s guidelines on “getting in the n8tive zone” (which is such a gimmicky marketing slogan it almost makes me cringe), you will require 2 servings of their Keto-OS product per day. This means around 60 servings per month, which will set you back a whopping $390 per month if you buy direct from their website! In the case of Prüvit, this is in part due to the multi-level marketing structure they operate under.

and by the way! the product you’re marketing has way too much salt – it will negate the true, natural process of any keto diet. salt will make you retain water, which is exactly what you don’t want to do, if you ever really want to lose weight! and if higher than normal blood pressure is your goal, enjoy responsibly! in fact, if you lower your overall salt intake, you will shed much more water weight in the first weeks, as mentioned elsewhere.. one of the secret cheats to get you going. drinking plenty of water and frequent urination will keep you properly hydrated – just be aware when testing with urine strips, too much water will give you a lower reading. stay hydrated, stay healthy – have fun losing the weight!
Hello! I’m planning on taking a short vacation and will be having “kept friendly” drinks, mostly vodka and water with lemon and stevia. When should I take my exogenous ketones? That night before bed or early the next morning or after the 3 day vacation is completely over? I’m unsure how to manage this to have the best odds of staying in ketosis and get back to burning FAT. Also, I just purchased Instaketones from Julian Bakery, what are your thoughts on this brand? Thanks for what you do!

There are several ways to approach the “intermittent” part of food restriction. One of the most common is limiting the window in which food is consumed to about eight hours a day. Another is fasting for a full 24 hours once a week, or once a month. Fasting beyond three days can be stressful on the body and should be done with medical advice and supervision.

A small side effect for some people is “ketosis breath”. Many people on a ketogenic diet have experienced this temporary phenomenon, and those taking exogenous ketones can experience it as well. The smell of your breath when you are early in the ketogenic diet can have a hint of acetone to it, and it might be mildly unpleasant, but it’s also harmless. Most gum is pretty low in carbohydrates and is a great option while your keto breath fades.

Divided attention involves processing multiple streams of information. The game involves observing a pond full of koi fish swimming around, and tapping each fish only once to feed it a pellet without feeding any fish previously fed. Each level adds more fish with increasing speed and redirection. It’s similar to pretending to be an air-traffic controller who must keep track of every plane on their radar.
Over the 28-day experiment, ketone supplements administered daily significantly elevated blood ketone levels without dietary restriction (Fig. 2a, b). Naturally derived ketogenic supplements including MCT (5 g/kg) elicited a significant rapid elevation in blood βHB within 30–60 min that was sustained for 8 h. BMS + MCT (5 g/kg) elicited a significant elevation in blood βHB at 4 h, which was no longer significant at 8 h. BMS (5 g/kg) did not elicit a significant elevation in blood βHB at any time point. For days 14–28, BMS + MCT (10 g/kg) and MCT (10 g/kg) elevated blood βHB levels within 30 min and remained significantly elevated for up to 12 h. We observed a delay in the peak elevation of blood βHB: BMS + MCT peaked at 8 h instead of at 4 h and MCT at 4 h instead of at 1 h. Blood βHB levels in the BMS group did not show significant elevation at any time point, even after dose escalation (Fig. 2a). Synthetically derived ketogenic supplements including KE and BD supplementation rapidly elevated blood βHB within 30 min and was sustained for 8 h. For the rats receiving ketone supplementation in the form of BD or the KE, dosage was kept at 5 g/kg to prevent adverse effects associated with hyperketonemia. The Precision Xtra™ ketone monitoring system measures βHB only; therefore, total blood ketone levels (βHB + AcAc) would be higher than measured. For each of these groups, the blood βHB profile remained consistent following daily ketone supplementation administration over the 4-week duration. (Fig. 2b).

For whatever reason, many patients won’t attempt a ketogenic diet—even if the evidence is clear that it could help. Doctors are often hesitant to recommend dramatic dietary shifts—even if they believe in their efficacy—to patients who are already dealing with difficult health issues. If you’ve got a picky kid with epilepsy, a pickier adult with Alzheimer’s, or a cancer patient who refuses to give up the familiar-yet-non-ketogenic foods that give him some small manner of comfort in this trying ordeal, exogenous ketones could make a big difference.

Other studies have found that fasting was as effective as chemotherapeutic agents in delaying progression of different tumors and increased the effectiveness of chemotherapeutic drugs against melanoma, glioma, and breast cancer cells. Although this research may not apply to your life, it does suggest that intermittent fasting can help support your body in times of toxic stress.

Now onto the best ketone supplements. All of these 5 are great products with good customer experiences and reviews. The list contains 3 MCT oil powders and 2 BHB salts. Since it’s just 5 products, there’s no room for bad quality. If you see a lower rating it may be due to price/value, the taste or perhaps a lack of third-party inspection certificates.
Recently, a friend of mine’s dad had high blood pressure. His doctor told him to stop consuming eggs and to avoid adding extra salt to his foods. That’s it. His recommendation was to rid a good, high-quality protein source, yet French fries, chicken nuggets, and even chicken noodle soup were all presumably okay. I’ll never understand some of these recommendations; nonetheless, they happen day in and day out, all over the world.
Uncontrolled diabetics may face some risks in using exogenous ketones. This is because when the body is unable to produce insulin (type I diabetics and extreme type II diabetics), it is unable to get sugar or glucose into the cells. Therefore, the body will start producing ketones. If these individuals do not use an insulin injection, they can overtime build up unsafe levels of ketones (6).

That’s exactly what ketones do: inhibit lipolysis, the breakdown of body fat into triglycerides and free fatty acids for burning. In normal conditions where ketones are produced endogenously, this is expected and beneficial. If homemade ketones increased lipolysis, you’d end up with ketoacidosis. You’d make ketones which released more body fat which got turned into more ketones which released more body fat which became more ketones. And on and on. It simply wouldn’t stop.

Some people follow more of an Ultra Low Carb diet approach. This is generally around 50g or less of carbs per day. A ULC is more supportive of reaching a ketogenic state, but again total carbs are not the only variable when it comes to reaching ketosis (other factors such as types of carbs, protein consumption, portion size, ingredients, supplements used etc. all play a role and will be covered in more detail below).

Despite the recent growth of the ketone salt market, there is very little published work analyzing the effects of these products on any biomarkers or performance measurements in humans. Several studies have been carried out in rats,6,7 with blood BHB levels being relatively low (<0.5 mM) post-consumption of salt drinks. In humans, ketone salts provided peak D-BHB levels of 1 mM, whereas the same amount of BHB in a ketone ester (BD-BHB) raised blood BHB to 2.8 mM.5

This may have been mentioned, I haven’t checked all comments, but glutamine causes gluconeogenesis so that may explain why it affects Ketosis. Whenever I took a glutamine powder supplement for gut healing, I noticed I would “feel” less Ketogenic and I knew it was affecting me adversely. Glycine (which is also in bone broth) also has this effect I believe. Apparently some amino acids are just more easily converted to glucose.
Exogenous ketones are powerful. They will get you into ketosis whether keto-adapted or not. The benefits of this range from weight loss to sustained mental and physical energy. The benefits are the same as those from nutritional ketosis, however, they’re not a substitute for nutritional ketosis. More on that below before we get into the top 5 exogenous ketones for 2018.

Even though there is mixed evidence regarding the association between calcium supplementation and cardiovascular events, there may be other reasons to avoid high calcium supplementation. In one of his studies, Dr. Bolland claimed that calcium supplements do not prevent hip fractures. Rather, they may lead to kidney stones, acute gastrointestinal events, and increased risk of myocardial infarction and stroke. Thus, the risks involved with high-calcium supplementation potentially outweigh the benefits[21].

The salts typically utilize sodium, potassium, calcium, or magnesium as the cation. Because these cations vary in molecular weight and valence (1+ or 2+), the amount of mineral delivered per gram of BOHB varies from 10% for the magnesium salt to 27% for potassium. Given that recommended daily intakes of these various minerals range from a few hundred milligrams up to 5 grams, whereas the daily ketone intake goal to mimic nutritional ketosis blood levels would need to be on the order of 50 grams, achieving this goal with ketone salts would severely challenge human dietary mineral tolerance.
KE consumption decreased FFA from 0.6 to 0.2 mM, TG from 1.0 to 0.8 mM, and glucose from 5.5 to 4.7 mM by the end of the study (4 h). The effect was not altered by a meal (Figures 5A–C). Dextrose drinks also lowered FFA from 0.6 to 0.2 mM and TG from 1.0 to 0.7 mM (Figures 5A, B). This was likely mediated by the transient increase in glucose, which rose from 4.6 to 6.5 mM following the dextrose drink (Figure ​(Figure5C).5C). The anti-lypoytic effect of dextrose drinks was shorter than that of KE drinks as d-βHB concentrations were elevated for longer after KE drinks than glucose after dextrose drinks. Insulin increased to ~ 35 mU.ml−1 after both the meal and the dextrose drink, but also increased to 13 ± 2 mU.ml−1 when KE was consumed whilst fasted owing to the 15 g of glucose in the flavored drink used as a diluent (Figure ​(Figure5D5D).
We demonstrated that therapeutic ketosis could be induced without dietary (calorie or carbohydrate) restriction and that this acute elevation in blood ketones was significantly correlated with a reduction in blood glucose (Figs. 2, ​,33 and ​and4).4). The BMS ketone supplement did not significantly induce blood hyperketonemia or reduced glucose in the rats. The KE supplemented rats trended towards reduced glucose levels; however, the lower dose of this agent did not lower glucose significantly, as reported previously in acute response of mice [59]. MCTs have previously been shown to elicit a slight hypoglycemic effect by enhancing glucose utilization in both diabetic and non-diabetic patients [86–88]. Kashiwaya et al. demonstrated that both blood glucose and blood insulin decreased by approximately 50 % in rats fed a diet where 30 % of calories from starch were replaced with ketone esters for 14 days, suggesting that ketone supplementation increases insulin sensitivity or reduced hepatic glucose output [89]. This ketone-induced hypoglycemic effect has been previously reported in humans with IV infusions of ketone bodies [90, 91]. Recently, Mikkelsen et al. showed that a small increase in βHB concentration decreases glucose production by 14 % in post-absorptive health males [92]. However, this has not been previously reported with any of the oral exogenous ketone supplements we studied. Ketones are an efficient and sufficient energy substrate for the brain, and will therefore prevent side effects of hypoglycemia when blood levels are elevated and the patient is keto-adapted. This was most famously demonstrated by Owen et al. in 1967 wherein keto-adapted patients (starvation induced therapeutic ketosis) were given 20 IU of insulin. The blood glucose of fasted patients dropped to 1–2 mM, but they exhibited no hypoglycemic symptoms due to brain utilization of ketones for energy [93]. Therefore, ketones maintain brain metabolism and are neuroprotective during severe hypoglycemia. The rats in the MCT group had a correlation of blood ketone and glucose levels at week 4, whereas the combination of BMS + MCT produced a significant hypoglycemic correlation both at baseline and at week 4. No hypoglycemic symptoms were observed in the rats during this study. Insulin levels were not measured in this study; however, future ketone supplementation studies should measure the effects of exogenous ketones on insulin sensitivity with a glucose tolerance test. An increase in insulin sensitivity in combination with our observed hypoglycemic effect has potential therapy implications for glycemic control in T2D [40]. Furthermore, it should be noted that the KE metabolizes to both AcAc and βHB in 1:1 ratio [29]. The ketone monitor used in this study only measures βHB as levels of AcAc are more difficult to measure due to spontaneous decarboxylation to acetone; therefore, the total ketone levels (βHB + AcAc) measured were likely higher, specifically for the KE [14]. Interestingly, the 10 g/kg dose produced a delayed blood βHB peak for ketone supplements MCT and BMS + MCT. The higher dose of the ketogenic supplements elevated blood levels more substantially, and thus reached their maximum blood concentration later due to prolonged metabolic clearance. It must be noted that the dosage used in this study does not translate to human patients, since the metabolic physiology of rats is considerably higher. Future studies will be needed to determine optimal dosing for human patients.
Exogenous ketones are also for those just looking to try it out. It lets anyone be able to access ketones simply by consuming these exogenous forms of ketones. Technically, MCTs are not an exogenous ketone such as BHB salts. They’re not ketones. But they readily convert into ketones. So MCT oils and powders are a great source of endogenous ketones. The end result is similar, and thus this top 5 list includes MCT oil powders as well as BHB salts.
If you have been reading the science behind the ketogenic diet, you know there can be a lot of benefits associated with choosing this way of eating. There is usually a transition period from when someone chooses to go on a ketogenic diet and implements the changes to their menu to when they actually get into ketosis and are able to produce and burn ketones for fuel.
If you are having a weight loss plateau and you’ve been at the same weight for 3 or more weeks, try changing something to get back to that stable weight loss rate, like a ketone supplement. It would be exciting to lose more than that each week, but our bodies don’t adjust to dramatic changes well, and a slower rate of loss leads to more of the weight staying off in the future.
Zenwise Health Keto BHB is an exogenous ketone supplement that features goBHB, an innovative beta-hydroxybutyrate complex that supports the body's fueling processes through nutritional ketosis to promote peak mental and physical performance. Great for reaching ketosis fast, to max out your pre-workout routine, while also promoting overall high-performance, brain function, and maximum endurance. This Keto powder formula features a Raspberry Lemonade flavor that will mix and shake well with any water based drink. Best of all, this BHB is formulated with absolutely no carbs or caffeine for clean energy. Simply mix this BHB powder with water-based drinks or your favorite fruit flavored drink or smoothie, and enjoy.

Affiliate Disclosure: There are links on this site that can be defined as affiliate links. This means that I may receive a small commission (at no cost to you) if you purchase something when clicking on the links that take you through to a different website. By clicking on the links, you are in no way obligated to buy.

Medical Disclaimer: The material on this site is provided for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Always consult your physician before beginning any diet or exercise program.